1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to methods and systems that provide computerized health care management, and more specifically, to a method and systems providing statistical assessment and prognostic information for individuals who are identified as being at the end of life within a predetermined period of time.
2. Description of the Related Art
The past decade of health services research has witnessed an explosion of prognostic models to help physicians understand the risks and benefits of proposed medical therapies and how to best treat patients in a given affliction subgroup. However, the application of such models to clinical practice has been limited by both their complexity and the lack of a practical mechanism for making them available at the time when medical decisions are made.
One goal of medical care is to make treatment recommendations to patients commensurate with their goals and values. To achieve this goal, one must describe the risks and benefits of a treatment that are relevant to given patient's situation. Models exist—currently these models remain largely academic and without a practical method or mechanism for being used in routine clinical care.
Computerized expert systems process information that usually corresponds to rules or procedures that are applied by human experts to solve similar problems. These systems do not utilize computerized predictive modeling to predict health events.